WICT PAR At Work: An Interview with Cyndee Everman and Lisa McBee

The 19 regional WICT Chapters are central to all aspects of the WICT organization. Regardless of  size, each chapter strives to provide industry companies opportunities to connect with WICT at a regional level, and leverage unique Chapter assets, such as educational and mentoring programs, which aid companies in meeting their professional development needs at the ‘local’ level. 

It is critical for Chapters to recognize and benefit from the fruits of their labor as they support and strengthen WICT National programs, particularly WICT’s advocacy platform, the PAR Initiative. Chapters make a yearly financial contribution directly to the PAR Initiative, a fundamental National program, which Chapters rely on to plan and prepare for their own future growth.

This month we spoke with two WICT stakeholders who gave us further details on the mutually beneficial relationship of chapter PAR contributions and the continuing advocacy efforts of the PAR Initiative. We spoke first with Lisa McBee, Director of Chapter Services at WICT, who shared with us how Chapter PAR contributions are utilized. We also spoke with Cyndee Everman, Vice President of Operational Support Systems for Time Warner Cable and President of the WICT Carolinas Chapter, who provided us with some great insight on how her chapter benefits directly from WICT’s PAR Initiative.
 

National Support: How Chapter Contributions Benefit the PAR Initiative

“WICT's 19 chapters generously contribute a percentage of their annual revenues to WICT’s PAR Initiative.  In 2007 and 2008, these donations totaled over $110,000,” says Lisa McBee. There are several ways that WICT uses these contributions to forward the PAR Initiatives' goal of encouraging the development of women leaders who are working to transform the cable and telecommunications industry. 

Contributions are primarily used to help pay for the independent research conducted by Working Mother Media, the basis of WICT’s PAR Initiative. This includes administering company surveys, fact-checking, performing follow-up interviews with participating companies and creating confidential evaluations that let companies know how their practices compare to other members of the industry.  
 
Chapter contributions also fund the annual PAR Initiative Executive Report, which helps companies learn from each other's best practices and adapt them to their own culture.  As McBee tells us, "This information is consistently important to our WICT members as a way to focus on issues such as pay equity, advancement opportunities, and resources for work/life support."  
 
These contributions are also used to help further efforts of the PAR Initiative to raise awareness about women in the workplace.  For example, McBee talked to us about the July, 2008 Congressional briefings by senior women executives to address the "ongoing efforts in the cable and telecommunications industry regarding women in the workplace" that allowed WICT to bring its message to Capitol Hill.  As McBee points out, "The event gained national exposure, increased visibility, and heightened awareness of WICT and its 8,000 members." 
 

Getting Local: How the PAR Initiative Helps Chapters
 
While the efforts of the PAR Initiative at the national level offer a roadmap for identifying and correcting inequities for the betterment of all industry employees, WICT's chapters put forth an even greater effort to capitalize on PAR’s research findings in order to provide relevant resources at the local level. For the chapters, this means an unwavering commitment to continually grow their yearly contribution to the initiative. As Cyndee Everman explains, this meant the Carolinas chapter committed to, far exceeding its 2008 year-end goal for PAR contributions, which they were successfully able to achieve.
 
Everman and her fellow Carolina chapter leaders are aware that such contributions aid the PAR Initiative in providing chapters with an "underlying theme" for their annual programming. As Everman simply puts it, "Everything that we do is geared towards helping women develop in the same areas that are the focus of the PAR research."
 
As an example, Everman discussed the Carolinas chapter’s recent Tech It Out event which provided outreach to high school girls.  “The event exposed these girls to opportunities in technology fields- both engineering and IT,” Everman tells us.  During the program attendees discussed the history of cable and the underlying technology; then taken on a tour through Time Warner’s labs and shown the cable operator’s regional data center.  "We are lucky, here in the Carolinas, because both our executive vice president of engineering and regional executive vice president are women, and both agreed to participate in the event," she says.
 
The Tech It Out events, as well as many other chapter events, including its mentoring summit and leadership conference in late October, are all motivated by the issues addressed by the PAR Initiative. For each of these events, Everman reports that WICT was able to provide excellent PAR-related material as well as general educational material that help chapters better communicate WICT’s message on a local level.